UK’s ARIA will test Lumai’s light-based AI servers in a data centre

ARIA’s Scaling Inference Lab will deploy Lumai’s Iris servers, which use beams of light to run AI calculations, as its first optical platform. Lumai claims big energy savings, but these have not been independently tested. The lab will test the servers in a commercial data centre.

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will test servers that use light to run AI models, in a lab it funds, Oxford startup Lumai said on Tuesday.

The Scaling Inference Lab, backed by £50M from ARIA and run by the nonprofit CommonAI, will install Lumai’s Iris servers as its first optical computing platform. It will run them across several machines in a commercial data centre, to see how they cope with real AI models, power and cooling.

Lumai, spun out of Oxford University in 2021, encodes data into beams of light. Its chips do the heavy maths behind AI using light rather than switching transistors, while normal electronics handle the rest. Salience Labs, which also builds on Oxford research, raised $125M last month for optical switches.

The company aims its hardware at “ prefill ”, the stage where a model first reads a user’s prompt. Ordinary chips would still produce the answer.

“ Lumai’s technology is the most mature optical compute platform we evaluated, ” said David Lewis, ARIA’s chief science and technology officer.

Lumai claims its approach could cut data centre power use by up to 90%. It also says the system is at least 16 times more energy efficient per request than silicon alone, when paired with standard chips. None of these figures has been independently checked, and testing them is the lab’s job.

The lab already hosts UK startup Oriole, which uses light to link AI chips. Nvidia, meanwhile, has spent billions on light-based connections inside data centres. Another UK inference-chip startup, Fractile, is raising at $6.5B.

Technology enthusiast and intern at The Next Web, contributing to research-backed content and investigating new technologies and global even (show all) Technology enthusiast and intern at The Next Web, contributing to research-backed content and investigating new technologies and global events. Interested in business and how the narrative and perception of technology is shaped.

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